Sage Arbor Ph.D.

Investigator Page

Research Projects - Engineered nanocomputers in a cell

It should now be possible to engineering proteins in a cell with unique amino acid codes to be recorded by the cell as they interact with other proteins. If we genetically modify the below constructs :

protein1—tag1—SplitInteinA

protein2—SplitInteinB—tag2—SplitInteinA

It should be possible when they interact to result in the following protein:

protein1—tag1—tag2—SplitInteinA

You could imagine after interacting with several proteins over time you would end up with:

At the end of an experiment reading the protein sequence (by Edmond degradation for example) would provide a list of the interactions this protein had interacted with. Instead of getting snapshots during an experiment this would be a complete history of interactions during the experiment. Protein99 could for example be a non-interacting protein used as a control. Its incorporation would serve as a time domain, being incorporated at random intervals based on concentration. In the above example you could see that protein1 interacted more quickly with proteins 2, 86, 23, and 29 than it did with 73.